(Edit: See comments section for a note from the originator of this map).

Our very first reader submission comes from Robin, who suggested I look at the library of maps available from Moon Travel Guides. There are a lot to choose from, but this one stood out as I browsed through:

Your geography lesson for today: Monteverde is a small town in Costa Rica, popular with ecotourists (thanks Wikipedia).

Biggest problem: No legend. This may or may not be remedied in the context of the guide in which the map is published (perhaps there’s a master legend at the front of the book), but this map is provided on the website without a guide, and needs to work in that capacity. So, let’s figure out the legend.

There appear to me to be eight different point symbols used on the map. There are stars, circles, squares, triangles with the points up, triangles with the points down, and pictures of moons. There’s also an unmarked symbol for a gas station at one point, and one of a church that says, “Church.”

I am guessing the stars mean different points of interest? There’s the “Natural Valley Nature Trail,” the “Monteverde Nature Center and Butterfly Gardens,” and the “Cheese Factory.” I cannot fathom what these all have in common other than perhaps they’re places tourists like to go. If you’re into cheese factories.

Then there are squares. These are labeled with things like “Monteverde Institute,” and, my favorite, “Friend’s Meeting House.” I’m guessing they mean it’s a Quaker meeting house, but the badly misused apostrophe makes me wonder if it’s just a house owned by the mapmaker’s buddy. “Yeah, I know this guy who has a sweet house down in Monteverde. We should totally meet down there. It’s near the Cheese Factory.” Grammar aside, it’s hard to tell what all the things labeled with squares have in common, that they do not have in common with the stars. Let’s just call it “things less interesting than the Cheese Factory.” We’re talking internet cafes, bullrings, and a toll booth.

There are circles (more or less – they seem rather deformed at certain points, but not enough that I think they’re different symbols than the circles), too. The labels suggest these are all hotels or other lodgings.

The triangle, with point up, is on the far right edge of the map, marking Cerro Amigos (1,842m) – a mountain.

The triangles with points down, while looking dangerously like mountains seem like places to eat: Johnny’s Pizzeria, Cafe Monteverde. But there’s also an amphitheater? Maybe it serves food.

These triangles are problematic. A square is different from a circle – and so we look at the map and say, “these must be categorically different things!” If you see squares and circles, but two kinds of triangles, your brain starts thinking, “these triangles must be more closely related to each other than they are to the circles or squares!” But I’m pretty sure food and mountain are not too connected. So, a different shape is advisable here.

Finally, there are the moon symbols. These mark towns, I believe. This symbol is apparently the company logo, and using it to mark cities makes roughly no sense. They’re trying to be cute. Cute is one way bad maps happen. Also, I just noticed that the nature reserve on the far right of the map, also uses a moon. I’m pretty sure that’s not a city. So, moon symbols in our theoretical legend should be marked as, “Towns, Cities, and Nature.”

This is why they make legends. So that I don’t have to spend several minutes figuring this out, with a chance of getting it wrong.

The author is rather inconsistent in how detailed a label they apply to symbols. One square is marked “Bank” and another “Massage.” But some list the specific business name: “Desafio Tours.” I am open to hearing an argument that there is a scheme behind this, but I’m not sure.

Also, most all the type on this map is in caps. Maybe they think everything in Monteverde is important. Caps are good for making things stand out. Unless everything is in caps, in which case nothing stands out. Good work. Setting a few letters in lowercase here and there will probably help the map look more professional, less…aggressive and in your face, for lack of a better description. Less like a five year old pulling on your arm and saying, “HEY LOOK AT THE POST OFFICE OVER HERE.”

One Nice Thing: They did use different shapes to represent categorically different things, so that’s a good use of shape. They could have used dot size, which would be a bad idea, because size is orderable, and “Points of Interest,” “Restaurants,” etc. are not. Shape is a good choice for these non-orderable things.

I’ve got to run, and I’ve run on too long, methinks. I’ll leave the rest to you, for this one. I’m on vacation at the moment (not in Monteverde – sadly, no Cheese Factory around here), so things may be slow around here for a week or so. Meanwhile, I hope you will all continue to send me bad maps you may find.

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7 Responses to “Finding the Cheese Factory”

Being in possession of a Moon guidebook (New England), I checked to verify what I suspected, which is that somewhere in the book is printed a legend. Indeed, on the last page is a map legend. The moon symbol, by the way, is a “highlight.” Surprisingly, you were dead on with your guess that squares indicate “things less interesting than the Cheese Factory.” Word for word, you nailed it.

Also on the same page is a pretty full list of unit conversions, in case you are visiting a place where the locals tend to measure distances in furlongs (201.168 m), as well as a drawing of a clock with 12- and 24-hour labels, in case you never learned to read a clock or don’t know how to subtract.

Anyway, the single separate legend is forgivable and even sensible in a book, but we see here the problem in taking maps that were meant to be published in printed collections and simply throwing them online without any efforts toward adapting to the different medium. Whereas originally we had a set of maps with a shared legend you could easily flip to, now we have a zillion maps with no legend at all.

I appreciate that they are putting these maps out there free, but it would be nice if, at the bare minimum, the webpage had the legend somewhere, even if they don’t attach it to every map.

Also, a friend of mine pointed out this evening that it looks to him like they printed the maps, then scanned them in, instead of exporting them out of whatever program they were originally constructed in (assuming they did them digitally). I’m not sure either way.

I found this blog by accident and feel compelled to respond to it. I am the surveyor, designer, and publisher of the original map of Monteverde in the early 1990s. Monteverde was my home for four years and before I created a map of the area there was nothing. I spent hundreds of hours surveying every road, path, and ‘driveway’ from the Cloudforest Preserve down to and through Santa Elena. I was known as map woman, carrying my red map case and survey tools with me wherever I went. This was all done at the dawning of PCs when there were only a handful of PCs, including mine, in the whole area. I was trained as a cartographer and graphic artist and ran an independent graphics business while I lived there as well as working for the Monteverde Conservation League. In addition to the map of Monteverde, I was also hired to map the Monteverde Cloudforest Preserve.

My original map of Monteverde/Santa Elena did include a legend, did not use all caps, did include a scale in the legend, and did not use the confusing symbols you refer to in the map above. Moon Publications first used my copyrighted map without my permission and thereafter began printing my credits. Since then, they have made so many alterations to it that it has ceased to be the map I created and I am happy that they no longer attribute it to me. Yet, and I stress this, my initially surveyed roads remain mostly intact on their map.

Some of your remarks are right on target and I agree with them. However, you have shown your ignorance in your smartypants ridicule of the Quaker ‘church’. This is a community largely founded by a group of Quakers from Alabama and if you had done a bit more research, you would know that ‘Friends’ is a synonym for Quakers. This place has always been known only as the Friends Meeting House. Nobody ever called it the Quaker Meeting House. Aside from the misplaced apostrophe, it is correct as labeled on the map.

And your snarky comment about the Cheese Factory, “…if you’re into cheese factories” compounds your ignorance of the area. The original Quakers established a cheese factory as a way to get their dairy products to market without spoiling on the arduous journey down the mountain. Since then, the cheese factory gradually became operated by and handed over to Costa Ricans. It is historic and speaks to the very nature of the Monteverde that is enjoyed by so many visitors today. Monteverde cheeses are excellent and known throughout Costa Rica. The factory is part and parcel of Monteverde.

In addition, let me say that there are real residents in Monteverde who value their privacy. To protect their interests, my original survey included some paths and private roads that were never printed on the published edition.

Thanks for chiming in! You make some fair points: I have likely been unfair and ill-toned in some of my comments. This is probably true of many of the early posts I made here, before I tried to shift my tone to be more productive and positive (which probably correlates with the steady decline of new content here). Anyway, all that is not intended as a defense or excuse.

I’m sorry that your map was lifted by Moon and used commercially without your permission! That’s quite terrible, and I hope that you were able to get some sort of apology and restitution from them.

I’ll put a note at the top of the post that alerts people to your comments, so they can hear your extra context information.